An ancient Dominican church in the Hungarian town of Vác was swarmed with researchers in 1994. When they opened mysterious crates inside the sacred site, experts were shocked to find the well-preserved remains of 265 individuals.

They were not ordinary bones, but surprising mummies . What’s more, they were affected by a disease that, for the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, used to be quite mysterious. 

The so-called “tuberculosis bacillus” was only discovered by researcher Robert Koch in 1882. The disease is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis and mainly affects the lungs, causing prolonged coughing, phlegm and fever. However, people in the 18th century did not know its cause. 

One third of the individuals died from the disease, without knowing the exact reason. It turns out that 90% of the mummies were affected by tuberculosis, even if the patients did not know when they became ill.

And, as the remains were in an excellent state of preservation, this allowed scientists to make a very important discovery for science: it will be possible to better understand the evolution of the disease over the centuries. 

A sick family

Tuberculosis affected an entire 18th-century family, which was discovered among the mummies in the boxes. They were the Hausmanns: there was the body of the eldest sister, Therezia Hausmann, who died at the age of 28, on December 27, 1797; and there was also the mummy of the mother, whose name is unknown; and of the younger sister, Barbara Hausmann, whom Therezia had cared for.

All three, however, died of tuberculosis. Terézia died four years later, after caring for and watching her mother and sister die. What was very useful, however, is that the deaths occurred at a time before the use of antibiotics, which means that the bacteria had not yet undergone mutations generated by these drugs. 

According to Revista Exame, anthropologist Ildikó Szikossy, from the Hungarian Natural History Museum, considered the discovery capable of bringing “new paths of medical research, which can be used by modern medicine”. 

In an interview with EFE, the expert also said that at that time there were several strains of the disease that coexisted at the same time. When they analyzed the DNA of the mummies, they found branches that originated in the Roman Empire. Only Terézia Hausmann’s mummy, for example, had two different types of tuberculosis bacteria. 

The discovery was published in the journal Nature Communications . “It was fascinating to see the similarities between the TB genome sequences we recovered and the genome of a recent strain in Germany,” said Mark Pallen, professor of microbial genomics at Warwick Medical School in the UK, in a statement. 

According to Pallen, the study can help track the evolution and spread of microbes. It also “revealed that some [bacterial] lineages have been circulating in Europe for more than two centuries,” the expert pointed out. 

Mummification 

For the researchers’ convenience, the bodies had been deposited in the Hungarian church between 1730 and 1838, which allowed them to be preserved. This all happened because, in the 1780s, King Joseph II prohibited burials in religious crypts, where the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ were placed one on top of the other, without separation, which was increasing contamination in the region. 

However, the residents of Vác did not respect the monarch’s prohibition. As part of their cultural tradition, they went to the Hungarian church and placed several bodies of important people there. Until, in 1838, the place was finally closed.

The small cathedral then fell into oblivion. However, the temperature of the icy place, which varies between 8 and 11 degrees, and its high humidity of 90%, allowed a natural mummification process .

Wood chips placed in the bottom of the coffins, which absorbed bodily fluids, and natural antimicrobial agents in the pine resin in the coffins may also have helped. The internal organs were thus left largely intact, allowing for the detection of tuberculosis bacteria. 

The mummies were transferred to the Hungarian Natural History Museum. According to data from the World Health Organization, the bacterial disease that annihilated them today still kills 4,500 people every day worldwide, according to data from 2019. The answer to new treatments for tuberculosis may lie in paleomicrobiology, the fascinating study of how microbes acted in the past. 

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